China’s Dada-JD Daojia pivots to omnichannel and country’s interior in search for more growth

Logistics and e-commerce giant looking at linking physical and digital, with an eye on China’s interior to drive growth

Dada-JD Daojia, the Chinese logistics and omnichannel ecommerce platform which claims it serves more than 1.2 million merchants and 74 million registered customers, is expanding its role as an omnichannel intermediary. The company has already established a service in major Chinese cities of being able to deliver direct to homes within an hour of an order being placed. Their major product lines are in fresh fruits and vegetables, groceries, flowers, baked goods and pharmaceutical products. It says it wants to roll this out with more stores and further into the interior of China, using investment from its powerful backers, including Sequoia, DST, JD, and Walmart.

Omni-channel retail strategy is a growing trend in China

The company believes that the slowdown of offline retailing growth has become an important issue for Chinese retailers and believes that there is huge potential to act as an intermediary for physical stores in the grocery and delivery sector, much like Amazon’s current strategy. They hope that adding in retailers onto their e-commerce platform will add in user growth, while improving the retailers operation efficiency and user experience.

"Dada-JD Daojia, [which is] rooted in supermarket O2O and grocery delivery, has proposed the best solution - omnichannel business aggregation platform and fulfillment system," said He Huijian, Vice President of Dada-JD Daojia. "The core of retail is efficiency and shopping experience. And it is the mission of Dada-JD Daojia to help retailers to develop e-commerce efficiently and provide consumers with the best shopping experience."

To this end it has launched the "Helper" omni-channel business aggregation platform. It aims to integrate and process orders from multiple online channels and offline stores. Dada-JD Daojia claims that joining the platforms leads to an increase in the average daily order volume of an offline store increasing by 15% month-on-month, as well as the average picking time decreasing by 37%, and the time-out order volume decreasing by 55%.

"According to a research of Dada-JD Daojia, 70% of the order problems [are] related to offline store's fulfillment, such as missed picking, out of stock, time-out, slow delivery and so on," Lian Yanjie, General Manager of Retail Empowerment Department said. "After linking multiple channels to the omni-channel data platform, the operation of the store will be perceptible, efficient and convenient."

Lower-tier expansion

Dada-JD Daojia now wants to push its last-mile delivery logistics and delivery service out into the Chinese hinterland after covering all tier 1-2 cities.

According to the company the strategy is succeeding. It says that the total sales of regional retailers that cooperate with Dada-JD Daojia have doubled in past half year, and some of them increased by 200%.

During the "1020 Supermarket Shopping Festival", held from October 14th to October 20th, the total sales on Dada-JD Daojia's platform nearly increased by 100% compared with same period last year. "The peak-day sales of some regional retailers increased by over four times compared with that in April," said Luo Jiaxing.

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